In May 2026, in Vienna, there was a four-day conference organized by Langer Circle, a group promoting the work of Susanne Langer (1895-1985), one of the first American women to have a professional career as a philosopher at a time when women philosophers were still an undiscovered species. Her work in symbol theory, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind dropped out of focus for several decades, but there has recently been a revival: besides philosophers, the conference gathered mathematicians, biologists, musicians, musicologists, and architects. While the general atmosphere of the conference was enthusiastic about the fact that we are celebrating the legacy of a woman philosopher, it is worth noting that Langer studied and worked at Radcliffe, a women’s college affiliated with Harvard, while Harvard first admitted women in 1975, when Langer was already 80 years old. Though the lower stages of education have been more open to women, the higher education echelon, due to the social prestige it still offers, has been a fortress much harder to conquer. True, women today have access to colleges, graduate and postdoctoral programs, and affirmative action, while it existed, supported women’s enrollment and hiring that was crucial for minority women who have been doubly disadvantaged, except that now it has been abandoned with glee by the same camp that erected obstacles for women and minorities to begin with. What still stands in the way of women in general getting a fair chance are persisting stereotypes about women’s supposedly naturally limited intellectual abilities, different affinities and special suitability for certain professions, socially defined gender roles, and, what I intend to focus on, their reproductive role. For minority women, the situation is especially problematic, bearing in mind intersectionality, i.e., added racial stereotypes and persisting social and economic inequality.
Fighting against gender and racial stereotypes, feminists strived to stay clear of biology. In spite of what my gynecologist father told me when I declared I wanted to study philosophy, women’s brains are not necessarily ruled by their hormones and incapable of rational thinking; our IQs are not the function of our sexual organs nor of our superficial gender, ethnic, or racial differences. While criticism of traditional models of ethics and epistemology might have a point, by pairing it with a defense of a separate, feminine, moral, epistemological, and even logical principles is again doubling the standard and undercutting the claim that all human beings should be judged by the same moral standards, that the ways of getting at the truth apply in the same manner to us all, and that societies should be arranged so that all human beings get equal chances.
When fighting social discrimination and marginalization that finds its justification in the supposed natural gender and racial differences, however, we are downplaying biological facts that cannot be denied, such as that only people with uteri are the ones who can get pregnant and thereby undergo significant hormonal and physical changes. Only people with uteri need to invest time and effort to sustain their pregnancies, commit to tolerating significant physical pain, and subject themselves to all kinds of restrictions, literally risking their lives by giving birth. Even after delivery, they stay physiologically and psychologically linked to their babies while nursing and caring for them.
The second wave of feminism was successful in demonstrating that women can perform in demanding careers; however, it brought women to an unsustainable impasse where they stand under a tall order to prove themselves equally professionally successful as their male colleagues while they are, by biological necessity, the ones who need to take time off from pursuing their professional goals while carrying, giving birth to, and nursing babies. While I am, as a mother of four who raised them while studying and teaching without a single paid day of maternity leave, certainly personally motivated to write about this problem, I hope I am giving a voice to my younger colleagues, whom I see struggling with the same issues every day. The window of opportunity to start an academic career is between the ages of 25 and 35, the time when one attends graduate school, publishes first articles, and tries to secure a college tenure-track position. Unfortunately, this is exactly the prime generative time to bear children. So, while others can pursue this track without biology standing in their way, the reproductive role is what holds mothers back.
I am not implying that pursuing an academic career is easy for women who do not see themselves as mothers, for men, for minorities, immigrants, or their children. On the contrary, graduate schools’ tuition is often exorbitant, so unless one is independently wealthy, the need to support oneself or the family while attending classes, preparing for comprehensive exams, and writing one’s dissertation is often an insurmountable obstacle which many talented people are unable to overcome. Those who succeed at pushing through often pay the price, be it by incurring huge educational loans on themselves, by jettisoning their personal integrity in a competitive rat race, or by sacrificing their mental and/or physical health and the stability of their families.
It might sound counterproductive defending the rights of mothers during a surge of conservatism in American politics, when the hard-won major legal protections of women’s rights have been revoked, or to plead for the rights of the half of the population, many of whom willingly support the conservative upturn, while the rights of minorities and immigrants are being trampled upon; still, unless we introduce special protection for mothers, the conservative call defending the right to life of fetuses and embryos against the rights of their mothers sounds like an empty platitude engineered for political battles, which of course it is. Unless we create a more humane society where the most vulnerable part of the population that the survival of the society actually depends upon, i.e., pregnant and nursing women and their babies, are offered special protection, we cannot hope for a society where other, comparably vulnerable sections of population will be equally protected.
Women who are seduced by the current conservative movement that apparently extols family values and who dream of dedicating themselves to raising children, granted they have someone who will support the family financially, will soon find themselves in the situation of American women in the 50s and 60s, feeling constrained and stunted by the inability to develop their potential for engagement that stretches beyond cooking dinners, changing diapers, and taking children to after-school activities. Conservatives, restricted by their poor imagination, anyway have no other proposal but to bring the clock back to the time they portray as the golden age of family values, when people supposedly took religion and moral values seriously, before feminism and the civil rights movement, before affirmative action, legalization of gay marriage and trans rights, before the “woke” era. The reality is that history cannot be pushed back no matter how hard everyone tries. The bare economic fact is that any middle-class lifestyle is impossible to sustain with only one earner in the family, so women will not be able to withdraw from the workforce.
Naturally, the easiest way to protect the status quo and shift the focus away from the need to radically change how this society protects parents and their children is adopting the divide-and-conquer strategy and pit working mothers against stay-at-home moms. Wasting their time and energy on groundless battles, women are diverted from the awareness that while babies definitely need their parents’ care in their early years, and while we are all complicated, multi-talented human beings who cannot fulfill all their potential in one single, albeit perhaps the most important biological and social role, society unfortunately does not secure the conditions that would allow us to accommodate both.
Most men are certainly more aware today of the need to share childcare and, unlike the U.S., there are societies actually providing universal health care, generous parental leaves, affordable childcare, and flexible work schedules; however, no matter how helpful these solutions are, there are still bare biological facts that stand in the way of women, let alone the minority women, having equal chances under present conditions. Recognition of all the commitments and sacrifices that are involved in one’s generative role is pushed under the rug by the widely promoted myth that women in today’s society can have it all, a propaganda that is sustained as a tool of pacifying women, preventing us from shaking the social status quo the way women’s lib movements did in the past. Ascribing to women “weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docility of manners,” the typical characterization of the “fairer sex” that Mary Wollstonecraft sought to dismantle in 1792, was equally maintained as a tool of social control that kept women from acquiring education appropriate to their abilities and stirring the balance of power. Media are full of examples of successful women who seem to have it all, making women internalize this goal as something realizable, only to eventually face the reality that there are only 24 hours in a day and that our energy is not unlimited. Since the utopian goal of having it all is fully internalized, once confronted with the impossibility of meeting it, many women end up feeling guilty and depressed, finding faults with themselves or with their partners for inadequate support, a recipe that spells unhappiness.
Even if American society provided generous support for childbearing and childrearing, the way that academia and other competitive professional institutions function makes it impossible for mothers to catch up to their counterparts who were able to pursue the expected track. Opportunities for academic positions and promotions are decided based on the number of publications in peer-reviewed journals, the neoliberal overproduction measured by publication indicators rather than by the quality of research and insight, the number of conference participations, the number of contributions to the college and the community, etc. Women who have to stay out of all these activities due to pregnancy and childcare can never get a fair chance in competition with those who stayed in the race meeting the requirements. You cannot put your children on your CV, nor, while staying at home, participate in networking that is sometimes more important for a chance of advancement than the documented achievements.
Many women who hope to pursue academic or similar competitive professional careers, therefore, simply reach a decision not to have children or to postpone starting a family to some later time that in reality might never come. It is still rare in academic circles to meet women with more than one child, if any, since being a mother somehow falls out of the profile of a serious intellectual and a dedicated professional. While the opportunity to take and teach online classes has greatly helped pregnant women and those caring for little children, progress in biotechnology and fertility treatments is seducing women into relying too much on their assistance, disregarding biological facts, and counting on postponing pregnancy and childbearing to the time when they will have already established their careers. When I hear women declaring that they will freeze their eggs and rely on conceiving in their late 30s or 40s, once their professional status has already been secured, I hear forced optimism, which is really an acknowledgement of helplessness.
Of course, one could ask a pertinent question: what changes should be implemented to give mothers a fair chance? We could start by providing universal, high-quality health care to support pregnancies, deliveries, and postpartum conditions; free or low-cost nurseries and childcare; and generous parental leave, including mandatory paternal leave. We could introduce a special academic track for hiring mothers, supporting their research and professional activities, offering flexible work schedules, providing childcare at educational institutions, and reducing or abolishing adjunct positions, etc. We can surely think of more radical paths to fairer social arrangements, for instance, reversing the individualism of the society where the basic societal unit is a single-family unit, making collective living and managing lives a rule, nurturing mutual support networks, etc. Because a society where one half of the population is not getting equal opportunities to pursue their life goals and develop their potential, insofar as it does not contradict the good of humanity, is by definition an unjust society. Let’s hope that if we work towards the proposed changes, we can one day reach a point where celebrating women’s academic achievements will no longer require pointing out that these are the achievements of women.
The Gender, Sexuality, and Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender, gender identity, and sexuality, issues of gender and sexuality injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender and sexuality injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Co-Editors Elisabeth Paquette or Zinhle ka’Nobuhlaluse.
Vanda Božičević Metzger
Vanda Božičević Metzger is originally a Croatian philosopher living in the United States. In Croatia, she taught in the Department of Philosophy at Zadar University, and in the United States, she taught as a professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Bergen Community College in New Jersey. In Croatian, she published Aesthetics of Susanne K. Langer, Word and Image: A Hermeneutic and a Semantic Approach, and Philosophy of British Empiricism. She translated into Croatian Arthur Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Nelson Goodman’s The Languages of Art, and W.O. Quine’s Word and Object.
